Paperless Office: How to Go Fully Digital (Fax Included)

By Michael Chen · Published November 8, 2026 · 10 min read

A paperless office keeps its documents as digital files: paper that arrives is scanned once, contracts are signed electronically, and records live in shared, searchable storage instead of filing cabinets. Going paperless takes a small office about seven steps, and the one most offices leave for last is the fax machine. mFax handles that step: received faxes are saved as PDFs, and you send from a phone, a PC or a browser.

This guide is the practical plan: what to scan, where to put it, how to name it, which signatures can go electronic, how long to keep things, and how to take the fax machine off paper. If you are only replacing the fax machine, skip to paperless fax.

What Is a Paperless Office?

A paperless office is one where documents are created, signed, shared and stored digitally, and paper is the exception rather than the default. Nobody really reaches zero paper. A realistic goal is that no document has to be printed to move to the next step.

Three things make that possible today:

• Scanning turns the paper that still arrives (mail, forms handed over the counter) into PDFs. A phone camera is enough for most offices.
• Electronic signatures replace print, sign and scan. In the US, the federal ESIGN Act says a signature, contract or record in interstate commerce cannot be denied legal effect just because it is electronic.
• Online fax replaces the fax machine, which otherwise keeps printing every incoming page on paper.

Going paperless is different from buying "a digital fax machine" or a scanner. Those are tools; this is a change in how the office handles documents. If you want the fax tool explained on its own, read what a digital fax machine is.

Paperless Office Benefits (and the Real Costs)

The main paperless office benefits are lower running costs, faster retrieval, documents available to the whole team from anywhere, and fewer lost originals. The cost side is the easiest to put numbers on, because paper and toner are paid by the page.

Here is what printing costs, using prices read from Staples on 2026-11-13:

A worked example: an office that prints 2,000 pages a month spends about $123 a month on paper and toner alone (2,000 × 6.2¢). That leaves out the printer, its repairs, electricity, the filing cabinets and the time spent looking for a folder. Your own numbers will differ; plug in your page count and your cartridge. The full breakdown for the fax machine itself, including the line, is in our fax machine cost guide.

Benefits that are harder to price but matter as much:

• Search instead of digging. A named, dated PDF is found in seconds; a misfiled folder may never be.
• Work from anywhere. A document in shared storage is available to whoever needs it, at the office or at home.
• One copy, not five. Fewer printouts means fewer stray copies of sensitive documents on desks and in recycling bins.
• Continuity. Paper burns, floods and walks out the door. Files can be backed up.

How to Go Paperless in an Office: 7 Steps

Going paperless works best as a short project with an order to it: stop new paper first, then deal with the old. Here is the plan for a small office.

Step 1: Find Where Paper Comes From

Spend one week noting every piece of paper that enters or leaves the office. Typical sources:

• incoming mail and invoices
• forms clients fill in at the front desk
• documents printed only to be signed
• faxes that the machine prints automatically
• internal printouts nobody needed

Each source gets a digital replacement in the steps below. The ones you cannot replace (a regulator that only accepts originals, a client who mails checks) become documented exceptions, not reasons to give up.

Step 2: Choose One Place to Store Files and One Way to Name Them

Pick one shared storage location for the whole office: a cloud drive your team already uses, or a document management system if you need workflows on top. Two places is how files get lost again.

Then agree on a folder structure and a naming rule, and write both down. A simple pattern that sorts well:

2026-11-08_ClientName_DocumentType.pdf

Dates first (year-month-day) keep files in order automatically. Avoid "final", "new" and "scan001" in names. Decide who can see which folders before you upload anything sensitive.

Step 3: Scan the Backlog, Newest First

Do not try to scan twenty years of files in a weekend. Scan active files first (anything touched this year), then older files as they are needed, and leave the archive boxes for last. Some old files can simply be shredded once their retention period is over (Step 6).

For a handful of pages a day, a phone is enough. Phone scanner apps find the page edges and straighten the photo into a PDF; our roundup of mobile scanner apps compares the options. The mFax Scanner in the iPhone, iPad and Android apps does the same: snap the page, and edge detection and auto-crop turn it into a fax-ready PDF. For boxes of paper, a sheet-fed desktop scanner is faster.

Two tips that save rework:

• Scan to PDF, and combine pages that belong together into one file. The free Merge PDF tool does that in a browser.
• Check a sample of every batch for missing or unreadable pages before the paper goes anywhere.

Step 4: Replace Wet Signatures with Electronic Ones

Most documents a small office signs (engagement letters, client forms, vendor contracts) can be signed electronically. Under ESIGN, a contract cannot be denied legal effect solely because an electronic signature was used to form it.

The law lists exceptions in 15 U.S.C. § 7003: wills, codicils and testamentary trusts; adoption, divorce and other family-law matters; court orders and official court documents; and certain notices, such as utility shutoffs, foreclosure or eviction on a primary residence, cancellation of health or life insurance, and product recalls. Keep paper, or check with counsel, for those.

For everyday signing you have two routes:

• An e-signature service for contracts that need an audit trail of who signed when. If the signed copy then has to go to a fax-only recipient, see how to fax a DocuSign document.
• A PDF editor for filling in and signing a form someone sent you. The free Edit PDF tool adds text and a drawn signature in the browser, with nothing uploaded. It adds a layer on top of the page; it cannot rewrite the existing text.

Step 5: Take the Fax Machine Off Paper

Fax is usually the last paper holdout, because healthcare, insurance, legal and government offices still ask for it. You do not have to stop faxing to stop printing faxes. Replace the machine with an online fax service, and faxes become PDFs in both directions. The next section walks through it.

Step 6: Set Retention Rules Before You Shred

Write down how long each type of record must be kept, and only then shred paper or delete files. The detail is in the retention section below.

Step 7: Train the Team and Make Digital the Default

A paperless office fails quietly when one person keeps printing. Make the change stick:

• Show everyone the folder structure and naming rule (a one-page cheat sheet is enough).
• Move the shared printer somewhere slightly inconvenient.
• Set every scanner, app and fax line to save to the shared storage, not to someone's desktop.
• Review after a month: what is still being printed, and why?

Paperless Fax: Receiving and Sending Faxes Without Paper

Paperless faxing means faxes arrive as PDFs and leave from a phone, a computer or a browser, so nothing is printed at either end of your office. The recipient's side does not change: their fax machine or fax service receives a normal fax. For the general methods, see how to fax without a fax machine; here is how it fits a paperless office.

Receive Faxes as PDFs

Every mFax plan includes a fax number for receiving, a local number in the United States or Canada that you pick under Settings › Fax number. Incoming faxes are saved as PDFs in the app, and the phone and tablet apps also send a push notification. From there the PDF goes into your shared storage like any other file, with your naming rule. If you need a fax that is already on paper turned into a file, converting a fax to PDF covers the options.

On an mFax Business workspace, the team fax line is shared: everyone in the workspace sends from that number and sees every incoming fax in the shared Received list, so a fax no longer sits in one person's tray.

Send from a Phone, a PC or a Browser

mFax runs on the iPhone and iPad, Android, Windows 10 and 11, Apple-silicon Macs and the web at app.mfax.to, with one account and the same history everywhere. Sending a paper form without printing anything looks like this:

Need to convert a file first? The free document converter turns Word files and images into PDF.

Fax from Email with mFax Business

With mFax Business, every member of the organization can send a fax from Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail: address the message to the fax number at send.mfax.to (for example 12125550147@send.mfax.to), attach the document and press Send. The address you sign in to mFax with is already authorized, so there is nothing to configure. The subject and body become the cover sheet; leave both blank and only the attachment is faxed. A status email comes back when the fax is delivered or fails. More detail is in our guide to faxing through email.

Keep the Office's Existing Fax Number

Clients already have your fax number on file, so keep it. On an mFax Business workspace, porting is free: start it from Settings › Team fax line › Move it to mFax, enter the account details exactly as your current carrier prints them, upload a recent bill and sign the letter of authorization. Most transfers are done within 7 business days. Keep the old line active until the port completes, then cancel it, and the fax machine can go.

Fax Machine vs. Paperless Fax

Paperless Office Software: What You Actually Need

You do not need an enterprise suite to run a paperless small office. Most offices cover everything with five kinds of tools, several of them free:

Pick tools that save straight to your one storage location. Every extra place a document can end up is a place someone will forget to look.

Retention: How Long to Keep Digital Records

Going paperless does not change how long records must be kept; it changes where you keep them. Decide retention periods per record type before shredding or deleting anything.

For tax records, the IRS page How long should I keep records? (updated 30 June 2026) sets the basic periods:

Can scans replace the originals? For tax records, Rev. Proc. 97-22 lets a business keep books and records in an electronic storage system that images its paper records. It permits destroying the original paper after you have tested that the system reproduces the records properly and put procedures in place to keep it that way. The system also needs an index that lets any record be found and retrieved; the procedure accepts one that works like a reasonable paper filing system. Other records (medical, legal, employment) have their own rules by state and industry, so check them before shredding.

How long does mFax keep faxes? The answer in the mFax support center, word for word:

Sent and received faxes stay in your history, with their documents, until you delete them, so a fax from last year opens the same way as one from today. There is no automatic expiry and no setting to add one.

To remove something, open the fax and choose Delete. Deleted faxes and documents cannot be recovered; that is a privacy decision, not a limitation.

Faxes received on a shared number are the exception: they are not stored at all. Deleting your account removes everything at once.

So mFax will not delete faxes on a schedule for you. Save the PDFs you must keep into your records storage under your naming rule, and put deleting old faxes on the office calendar when their retention period ends. Faxes and documents are stored encrypted on servers in the United States; data residency for fax explains why that matters for regulated offices.

Common Mistakes When Going Paperless

Most failed paperless projects fail for the same few reasons:

• Scanning everything before stopping new paper. The backlog grows while you scan it. Fix the inflow (Steps 4 and 5) first.
• No naming rule. A drive full of scan0042.pdf is a filing cabinet with the labels torn off.
• Shredding before checking. Spot-check scans for missing pages, and confirm the retention period, before anything goes in the shredder.
• Keeping the fax machine "just in case". As long as it prints, someone has to collect, file or scan the pages. Port the number and retire the machine.
• Sending health information by plain email. For patient records, use a channel your privacy officer accepts, such as faxing with a signed BAA.

Going Paperless Starts with the Fax

The fastest win in a paperless office is usually the fax machine: it prints every page that arrives, it needs its own line, and it is the one device the whole office still walks over to.

For a practice or office, mFax Business gives you the office's own fax line shared by the team, faxes that arrive as PDFs, email to fax from every member's inbox, free number porting and a signed BAA, across web, mobile and desktop. It starts from about $9/mo, and you build your own plan from the seats and pages you need.

Just need to send one fax? Open the mFax app, scan or upload the document, and send it in under 2 minutes, free for 7 days.